3 ms·

> I used Photoshop for 8 years, including for web development, before switching to Gimp. > Gimp is good enough for everything one needs in web dev, is free, an

by troad 4y ago

> I used Photoshop for 8 years, including for web development, before switching to Gimp. > Gimp is good enough for everything one needs in web dev, is free, and has a vital feature Photoshop lacks: the ability to run on a Linux workstation. When developing software intended for Linux servers the value of having a Linux workstation to easily do local development cannot be understated. Precisely. You're a dev for whom GIMP is "good enough". If you were dissatisfied you might make a new tool, but since GIMP suffices, you happily use it and see no reason for anything else. Meanwhile, artists and designers who work in Photoshop day in and day out - the people comprising the bulk of Photoshop's actual market - overwhelmingly reject GIMP, and they don't generally have the capability to make a new tool, so they stick with Adobe. At the risk of making an imperfect analogy, imagine you wrote a French textbook. French teachers overwhelmingly rejected your textbook and didn't use it in their classrooms. But at the same time, other language professionals sometimes found it helpful for small things like double checking the conjugation of some obscure verb, and they'd defend it because they found it useful. Is your French textbook a success? I'd say no. I'd say you're not only failing your primary market, but you're lulling fellow professionals into a false sense that there's sufficient tools out there for that market, which is doubly harmful.

pessimizer 4y ago
> Meanwhile, artists and designers who work in Photoshop day in and day out - the people comprising the bulk of Photoshop's actual market - overwhelmingly reject GIMP, and they don't generally have the capability to make a new tool, so they stick with Adobe. That's because Photoshop was early and is an industry standard, so you're going to have to learn it anyway. There's no incentive to learn GIMP because it's not going to cut you out of a job, and there's no incentive to move your shop to GIMP because all it's going to do is eliminate the massive bulk of the labor pool that is unfamiliar with it. Also, if you do print, the color situation in GIMP is not good. But the self-congratulation here is silly. The market chose Photoshop because it was the only choice. The market didn't place it in its position, it largely began the market. The reason people choose to use it is because they are choosing to eat, not because they think it's better. People who think it's intuitive or straightforward are very different to me. The GIMPs feature organization is far superior to PS imo, it's just lacking a couple of very large features that require being woven throughout the implementations of everything in the data model, like proper color management and live filtering. That's to be expected from the nature of the project, because stuff like that would normally be focused on by a team that would consult with every other team to keep systems like that consistent and debugged. Free software has to rely on individual developers to get inspired to create a system themselves, completely married to the current design, that bolts what they're doing to every component. It's hard. But when we get it, no one can take it away from us. They could start charging by the minute to use Photoshop tomorrow.

by troad 4y ago

pessimizer 4y ago

> Meanwhile, artists and designers who work in Photoshop day in and day out - the people comprising the bulk of Photoshop's actual market - overwhelmingly reject GIMP, and they don't generally have the capability to make a new tool, so they stick with Adobe. That's because Photoshop was early and is an industry standard, so you're going to have to learn it anyway. There's no incentive to learn GIMP because it's not going to cut you out of a job, and there's no incentive to move your shop to GIMP because all it's going to do is eliminate the massive bulk of the labor pool that is unfamiliar with it. Also, if you do print, the color situation in GIMP is not good. But the self-congratulation here is silly. The market chose Photoshop because it was the only choice. The market didn't place it in its position, it largely began the market. The reason people choose to use it is because they are choosing to eat, not because they think it's better. People who think it's intuitive or straightforward are very different to me. The GIMPs feature organization is far superior to PS imo, it's just lacking a couple of very large features that require being woven throughout the implementations of everything in the data model, like proper color management and live filtering. That's to be expected from the nature of the project, because stuff like that would normally be focused on by a team that would consult with every other team to keep systems like that consistent and debugged. Free software has to rely on individual developers to get inspired to create a system themselves, completely married to the current design, that bolts what they're doing to every component. It's hard. But when we get it, no one can take it away from us. They could start charging by the minute to use Photoshop tomorrow.